Full Battle Rattle had its North American Premiere this week at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX. It is peculiar and somewhat surreal film that takes an unusually non-judgmental approach to this controversial war. The audience observes the bizarre scene of soldiers and Iraqi-American actors playing war in a fake Iraqi town at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin in California's Mojave Desert. While the filming and graphics are reasonably well-done in a technical sense, the whole experience that we are witnessing feels fake and inauthentic.
The film raises a host of important ethical questions which it refuses to engage. The major one is: Does this training help the soldiers prepare for a war that isn't a game? The whole idea that war is a game and that success is learning to play the game better is troubling. It suggests that the military is completely disconnected from the political consequences of the war. The real Iraq is infinitely more complicated than any war game and at the end all the players do not get up and go home. Death is present, but only as it would be on a movie set. After all, all the blood is fake.
Sadly, the film sometimes feels like a propaganda video for how well the Army is training to fight the war rather than a serious attempt to analyze and document. Obviously, the filmmakers had to cooperate with the US Army to make the film and the end product suggests that doing so has compromised the integrity of the project. Unfortunately, we are not provided any outside commentary on the effectiveness of the training techniques by outside scholar or critics. The audience is left with only our own uninformed inferences to speculate on what they are seeing. This project cried out for a broader contextual framework.
The film seems to implicitly accept President Bush's logic of the "surge" (which we hear the President explaining at one point late in the film). The logic is that all we need is more troops performing better to win the war. Nobody asks if the war is winnable or not. That is simply assumed. This is also the logic that is accepted by the obedient soldiers and the Iraqi immigrants who are eager to please their new government. But it is a flawed logic that offer no real direction for ending the insurgency which can only be resolved through politics, not simply through military action.
The most interesting elements of the film are the personal stories of the Iraqi immigrants and the soldiers when they are themselves instead of being "in character," but this part of the story is unfortunately under-developed. A greater emphasis on the human side could have produced a more effective film.
Perhaps the most disturbing element of the film is the very existence of this facility which suggests the Army's long-term commitment to staying in Iraq. They are apparently planning to build a "fake" Afghan village there as well. The training facility and the efforts that they are going through are technically impressive (as is the film about them), but whether this training one will do the soldiers, the United States, and Iraq any good is not really examined. Like the Bush administration's policy about the war itself, this film is entirely non-reflective.
The biggest problem with this film is the underlying assumptions that its structure buys into. The film makers and the Army appear to be playing a game, but the game has no end, no winners, and sadly we are all losers. The Iraq War is a tragedy, not a game and its a shame the film makers didn't seem to realize that.
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